Avid Liquid Preview

( Article taken from New Zealand Video News )

“Avid Liquid 7 pre-view”

I went to Nelson at Imaging Technology for a preview of Avid Liquid 7. Now, those of you in the South Island will have seen this launch by this time or had the opportunity to go – and I hope you did whereas North Islanders have got a few more days to make sure that they get along to Imaging Technology and actually see Liquid 7 in action.

Ed: Nelson, what do you think makes this version of Liquid better than all the previous ones?

Nelson: The first thing I want to mention is the ability to let the user now have full control of the file management. Liquid used to be a full network solution handling all the media management, but with more than 100,000 users around the world, we have more and more users requesting the ability to control the files, name the files and put the files wherever they want them to be.

Ed: Just like in the old days with Premiere 6.5?

Nelson: Yes. You have absolute control, you choose the formats you want to digitise into, which include AVI, MPEG and DIVX. Select the bitrate which affect the quality & size of the captured file. Give it a name and basically capture into any folder and later on, manipulate it in File Explorer.

Ed: Does this detract from its ability to be a network solution if you do this or choose to do this?

Nelson: No, if the user decides to go this way, it’s basically deciding to let Liquid function as a stand alone system, the user will then have full control of the file management. If Liquid is still deployed as a network solution, the traditional way of logging the clips and letting Liquid manage the media will still be the perferred option. The Avid media management system will allow up to 22 users to work on the same project and accessing the media server all at the same time. Hence it is vital that media management system takes over the naming, positioning & storing of all the media.

Ed: Fantastic. Now the other thing we must mention straight away is that, with the proliferation of high def formats around, Liquid 7 has definitely got the capability of doing something special with the new JVC HDV camera footage?

Nelson: Just this morning, Bryce from Gencom brought over his camera and we have digitised some shots in HDV 720 24p, 720 30p and 720 25p and they all work seamlessly on the Liquid timeline. In fact, you can just mix and match all of them in the timeline and decide whether you want to up-sample into another different format like the 1080 format, or down-sample into standard definition or convert it into NTSC from PAL or 24 frames to give it a film alike look.

Ed: Liquid is actually capturing in each native format though?

Nelson: Yes, Liquid is capturing in its native format. There is no transcoding during capturing or printing back to the source, every thing is in it’s native format and that is why there is no generation loss in Liquid. Basically, Liquid is allowing users to capture and edit all kinds of formats natively, including the JVC HDV1 and Sony HDV2 formats and the MXF files from the Sony XDCAM and Panasonic P2 cameras.

Ed: And dissolves and all sorts of transitions and everything else works seamlessly on it?

Nelson: Yes, we’ve been putting page curls, we’ve been putting cross dissolves, we’ve been adding base colour corrections, filters and they all works in real time.

Ed: So you haven’t managed to kill it yet?

Nelson: Not yet!

Ed: That’s pretty good, because I have heard from a number of people that they have had trouble editing the JVC version of HDV so we have living proof here of an editing solution, Liquid 7, which is working seamlessly with it.

Now, we’ve also tried some footage from a P2 camera, the recently introduced HVX-200 and how have we found that P2 working Nelson?

Nelson: It’s brilliant. Just like the last time when we launched Liquid 6 with P2, you just literally slot the P2 card into the reader at the back of the computer and immediately Liquid picks it up. What we are seeing so far is that Liquid does not even need to copy any of the files onto the hard disc. We are actually editing the files straight from the P2 card and doing all the transitions and the filters. Even with1 main video track and 2 picture in picture running at the same time, we have no problems with that at all.

Previously in Liquid 6, for those who wanted to capture and edit MXF files from both the P2 and XDCAM, you had to pay an additional of $1,995+gst. Now these broadcasts features have been integrated into Liquid 7 together with all those assisting formats that allow you to work with standard definition and high definition.

Ed: But we have to say at this point that we’re doing this with the standard definition footage off the P2 card – that’s in a whole variety of standard def, but we have been finding some difficulties with the high def footage?

Nelson: Yes, we have no problem with the DVCPRO-25 or DVCPRO-50 in standard def. We are having slight difficulties dealing with the DVCPRO-100 and the HD format. We’re looking forward to see Avid working closely with Panasonic to get these drivers or the next codec being written up so that Liquid can work with them seamlessly, but in the meantime, Liquid is still supporting the DVCPRO-100 footage, user can import & place the clips on the timeline, it’s just that we have to render the clips first before it will play smoothly. Hence there is no stopping of users who wish to incorporate some DVCPRO-100 or HD clips into their exisiting working projects with Liquid.

Ed: Certainly there is a capability within Liquid to handle 1080-50i and other uncompressed high def formats, but it’s just a case of the codecs not in there yet?

Nelson: Yes, absolutely. We’ve been dealing with the Sony 1080i, we’ve been using other formats like JVC and it all works smoothly. Liquid is seeing & allowing the DVCPRO-100 or HD clips to be placed on the timeline like the rest. So what we need to do is just a closer relationship between the engineers from Avid and Panasonic.

Ed: So that’s something that’s coming up in the hopefully not too distant future?

Nelson: I hope so. I will get the Avid engineers to get back to me as soon as possible regarding this issue.

Ed: Excellent – but in the meantime, if you for some reason have any of this footage, Liquid’s pretty good at rendering it into something that you can use?

Nelson: Yes, just put it on the timeline in the latest version of Liquid. All this while, Liquid has the unique capability of doing background rendering while user is editing. In Liquid 7, you can even have the flexibility to select a portion of it to be rendered. For example, if you just want to have some DVCPRO-100 clips on certain segment of your project, you can just put them onto the timeline and render that segment of the the files you want.

Ed: So you can convert it to something that you’re using on your timeline?

Nelson: Yes, not a problem.

Ed: That’s that feature – what else? To me, the interface looks pretty much the same, but what’s another feature of Liquid 7 that people should look for?

Nelson: There are actually a lot of features – we’re talking about real time capturing into DIVX.

Ed: What’s DIVX, I’m not familiar with that?

Nelson: The DIVX format is another codec again, highly compressed video files, but the ability to preserve great quality even though it has been compressed.

Ed: What do you use them for?

Nelson: There’s a lot of DVD players out there that are able to play back DIVX discs. You can actually have the entire DVD encoded into one CD and still preserve almost 90 percent of the quality on the normal CD-R in DIVX codec. So in Liquid, we are now able to capture files into DIVX format in real time. Additionally we are also now able to deal with the Windows Media 9 HD formats – we can edit them and mix that up with other formats.

Ed: With this DIVX, can you also make your project in your normal AVI format and then export it as a DIVX?

Nelson: Yes, you’re definitely able to do that. There is an increase in the output options & the entire process is also simplified. Under the “Export to File” option, you can output into MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Windows Media, Quicktime, DIVX, Real Media, Flash and very interestingly we have the inclusion of two other formats that is the Play Station portable version and also the Video I-Pod. So, if you guys have all the gear, Liquid is there ready to export your videos.

Ed: Wow, that is certainly quite a major step forward because it now gives you the opportunity to produce a whole range of formats for your clients to view in any way they like.

Nelson: At the present moment I cannot find any other editing platform that can provide formats for the Sony Play Station portable. This is a very interesting feature. Same thing for the Video I-Pod. It makes things so easy for the I-Pod user now. This is another big step for Liquid’s move toward being an fully open format editing platform, allowing users to put all kinds of different formats on the timeline and exporting to any output format.

Ed: I guess it also means that you could render a reasonably long clip into something that you could send over the Internet as a proof?

Nelson: Absolutely. The MPEG-1, the Real Media, the Flash format – they are all very good formats for streaming video over the Internet.

Ed: Now we’re going to talk about smart sound – I understand there’s an additional improvement here?

Nelson: Yes. On top of the 5.1 surround sound that Liquid 6 had already been offering, in Liquid 7, users will be able to have access to the 26 different types of tunes and templates which allow you to create royalty-free music clips for your projects. What you need to do is just complete your projects and do a mark in and mark out, or basically key in your duration, and the smart sound tool will generate a royalty-free music based on the tune that you decide and laid out exactly to the point that you finished your project.

Ed: Are there more things that this Liquid 7 does?

Nelson: Definitely. We were talking about the time warping just now. Time warping has been upgraded to a real time warping. This means if you’re going to slo-mo your clips you won’t need to render them any more, there will be a real time preview. Of course we have 50 more new effects taken from another software called Commotion.

Ed: They’re not just Hollywood effects are they?

Nelson: No, not Hollywood effects but just to name a few : The Particle effects give the users the ability to create clouds or a fire or explosion scene over the exisiting video. There is also Image Stabilising filter, Smart Blur and Soft Focus filters & and lot more.

Ed: And really – I mean you don’t get a set of Ginzu knives with it, but that’s a pretty good selling point. Unfortunately I have to say there hasn’t been any improvement in the titling programme has there Nelson?

Nelson: The titling programme is still the same – Title Deko. Basically it depends on user feedback. The more feedback we get from the users, the higher it will be on the Avid priority-list!

Ed: Well I’ve certainly tried my dammedest to get them to do something about that titling programme, but hopefully next version?

Nelson: During NAB – talk to the guys at NAB.

Ed: Oh, so I have to go now do I?

Nelson: You can send me Grant.

Ed: Yeah, right.

So those are the key features from Nelson on the Avid Liquid 7. The first time that the Pinnacle name has gone and Avid is on the box so you know that it’s an Avid, but it doesn’t look like an Avid. To find out more, make sure you attend the Show in Auckland and, for those in the South Island who didn’t get to see it, you can always go and talk to Mike Symes at AVA and he’ll be able to show you Liquid 7 I’m sure.

In a box: Contact Imaging Technology etc etc.

Editing HDV with Liquid

( Article taken from New Zealand Video News )

What About Editing HDV?

Now it’s one thing to have an HDV camera recording high definition DV footage, but it’s another thing to actually edit it.

Ed: What does Imaging Technology have to offer in the true native HDV editing stakes Nelson?

Nelson: Ready to go we have Pinnacle Liquid 6. Liquid 6 was launched even before Sony officially released their HDV cameras and Liquid 6 natively supports high definition editing on the timeline without any transcoding.

Ed: So the standard Liquid 6 editing package, the Liquid 6 Pro that you buy, immediately can edit HDV?

Nelson: Yes, just basically capturing to FireWire, put it on the timeline, there’s no transcoding involved, there’s no AVI wrapper required. There’s a lot of third party codecs out there that literally try to convert your HD files into another different codec or create a wrapper so that you can do your HDV editing and a lot of them claim that these are all lossless quality, but there’s still a big question mark out there, whereas Liquid 6 just literally treats HDV like your standard DV files.

Ed: Gosh – so what about having a special computer to do it?

Nelson: Yes, when dealing with high definition, we’re talking about for one stream of high definition, depending on the format. The processing power required is easily 4 to 6.5 times equivalent to your standard DV. So we’re looking at computers that have dual processors, heaps of band width and RAID hard drive configuration as a minimum requirement.

Ed: So you can’t do it on a standard computer or can you do it, but it’s just a bit slower?

Nelson: I would say that I did try putting HD clips on my standard DV turnkey. It will playback 1 video layer but start to struggle with the second one. However, if you’re really looking at three to four layers of real time high definition video streams, you’re definitely looking at upgrading the system or better off, building a new one.

Ed: But if the vast majority of us aren’t actually interested in that many layers of real time and we’re quite happy to render sections where fancy transitions occur, we can have HDV on our standard systems?

Nelson: Yes you can have that, but my main concern is your capturing. If you’re capturing the 720p HDV format through the FireWire port, I should say that you’re still able to sustain a good capturing without dropping frames, but if you’re dealing with any other higher formats of HD, I would say your standard SATA drive may not be good enough for the job.

Ed: That’s if you’re using a single drive – but what about if you’ve got the twin stripe ATA drives?

Nelson: That’s what we’re advocating in our new sets of HD turnkeys that we’re building – they’re all raid together with at least four to five hard drives. That would definitely have high read & write speed. We are already building HD turnkey systems for our customers with components that were specially selected & integrated for performance & reliability. It is not only the hard drives that we are concerned about, we also need to incorporate powerful twin processors & graphic card to ensure the effects are playing back in real time & good bandwidth for processing the data.

Ed: But we’re trying to avoid this because we just want to make sure that HDV is actually going to be a useful format. I guess the biggest problem people are going to have is how are they going to output this to a DVD?

Nelson: Yes this is a very big debatable issue. We do not see any high definition DVD out yet, even though we have big companies working on it, so in the meantime it’s still about down-sampling into the SD format for standard DVDs. But I have come across a couple of articles in America where you have a lot of young producers and directors shooting high definition and down-sampling into standard definition on DVDs and they are really happy with the results.

Ed: That’s Liquid 6, but you have another couple of products that can also edit HDV?

Nelson: Yes, from Canopus we have the very new product called Edius NX for HDV. EDIUS NX provides realtime video output to any format. This means that all aspect ratio conversions between 4:3 and 16:9 video, frame rate conversions, including NTSC and PAL, and resolution conversions between standard and high

definition video are all processed in realtime. Editors can now seamlessly edit, in realtime, any mix of HD, HDV, DV, uncompressed, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1 video, maintaining the full native format, resolution and colour space quality of all video clips. The engine is resolution and frame rate independent to ensure support of future video codecs and formats. With a properly configured system, you can get up to four streams of real time when editing with high definition.

Ed: But you haven’t actually tried one of these yourself?

Nelson: No yet – I’m looking forward to it!

Ed: And this is using the Edius software and not Premiere?

Nelson: Yes, with the Edius software. Canopus is really focusing their engineering and resources into developing Edius and, as we can see, Edius has developed from the first prototype to version 3 within this two year time span. That’s a huge improvement, especially with the present version. Edius is also one of the few softwares that can really handle DV, AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, High Definition, uncompressed, so I’m really looking forward to that new product coming in.

Ed: And then you’ve got a third one that’s just appeared?

Nelson: There’s something that’s been on my mind – to become a full fledged digital video solution provider – a lot of people have been saying that I’m the “Liquid Man”, but seriously I’m open to different solutions, because there’s no one “best” product. On the Matrox side, I’m looking at this product called “Axio”. They have two versions of that – the SD version and the high definition version. Both versions come with their standard video capture card that provides the real time acceleration & a very professional breakout box with all the different input & output connectors. If you want to deal with uncompressed materials, then the SD version for Axio would be a good product to look at; and it is upgradeable at any time to high definition by just upgrading to the high definition breakout box.

Ed: What software would you use with that?

Nelson: That is good news for Premiere Pro users, because with Pinnacle officially announcing that they are not going to be using Premiere and with Canopus moving to Edius, I would say that for Premiere users, it seems that Matrox RTX100 will be only way to go. Well now, at least we have another product for the serious Premiere users. Last year, I had the chance to talk to the marketing manager from Matrox when they launched the Matrox RTX100 in Singapore, Matrox will continue their focus on developing a tighter integration between Matrox & Adobe products even though the other 2 major players, Pinnacle & Canopus had shifted the attention to their own editing platform. Hence, for Premiere Pro users, I’m sure they will be glad to hear that.

Ed: So, basically in a nutshell, how do you see HDV taking over the market – or is it early days yet?

Nelson: It’s still pretty early. It has been successful in Japan and the United States, but because in both countries they have strong support from the government. For New Zealand, it’s pretty much a demand and supply thing, because I can see that there’s not much high definition TV around, so it will not be generating a lot of demand at this present moment. But, as I say, it’s still debatable – until you personally shoot with a high definition camera and down-sample it into a DVD and compare it with a similar production using a DV cam, you’ll never know.

Avid Liquid with TVNZ, New Zealand

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